Leo Frankowski

remaining ninety-two
hours in the week spending money. If you work one hundred hours a week, you
have two and a half times the income but only thirty-two hours a week to spend
it in.
    It helps to get in on the ground floor of
a new in dustry, as I did with medical
instrumentation. It usually helps to
be a bachelor. And being crippled results in having fewer distractions. But the important thing is to get yourself into the habit of working yourself
to your very limits .
    —Heinrich Copernick
    From an address to the Chicago Junior Chamber of Commerce April 3,1931
     
    Heinrich Copernick
sat in front of his biomonitoring console. A thin plastic tube, red with his
blood, ran from his left thigh to the machine. A similar tube ran from the console back
to his leg. But the blood it carried was discolored with the chemicals that
had been added to it.
    “The calcium
level is a bit low again,” Copernick muttered to himself as he typed in revised
instructions to the mixer.
    The white numbers on
his panel were generated by a Cray Model 12 computer in the next room from a complete analog of the
biochemical reactions taking place within his body. Even with the algorithms
developed by his Uncle Martin, the program had taken more than two years to
write.
    Below each white
prediction number was a status readout of his actual biochemistry. These were all green except for calcium,
which was still in the yellow.
    The phone rang.
Copernick had disconnected the video section before he started his self-modification
program.
    “Hello.”
    “Mr. Copernick?
This is Lou von Bork.”
    “Hello, Lou. How
goes it in Washington?”
    “So-so. You
know that bill to put tree houses under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug
Administration? Well, I fixed it so it will die in committee.”
    “Great! Old
Anne Cary will spit nickels when she hears about it.”
    “Yeah. I just
hope that I don’t get in range. She’ll be at it again next year. And then she’ll have
the banking people behind her, besides the construction unions.”
    “Then we’ll
just have to lick them again.”
    “What do you mean
‘we,’ Mr. Copernick? I’m out here with nothing but a smile and a shoeshine.”
    “And you are
doing a fine job. You and your six technicians and nine million dollars worth of equipment. Now what’s the bad news?”
    “HEW. They just
passed a ruling that discriminates against people living in your uncle’s tree
houses. Not through Congress. A departmental ruling. Not a thing that I could do
about it.”
    “Just what did
they do?” Copernick asked.
    “Cut in half
the welfare benefits of anybody living in one. Think we should fight it? In court, I
mean.”
    “Sounds pretty
expensive. Let’s let this one pass. A guy with a tree house can still live well on
five hundred dollars a month.”
    “You’re probably
right, sir. Anyway, odds are the welfare types will do the suing for us.”
    “And doing it
with the government’s lawyers. Anything else?”
    “Oh, the army is
talking about using them for barracks. The National Real Estate Board wants to
make them
illegal. And the State Department is thinking about donating a few million
seeds to the Africans. But I don’t think that anything will come of any of
it.”
    “A government purchase?
Sounds nice. We’ll get a good price out of them,” Copernick said.
    “Like I said,
don’t hold your breath. Say, when are you going to get the video on your phone
fixed?”
    “You know the
phone company. Hey, how’s your old friend Beinheimer?”
    “Wonderful!
When you guys replace a fellow’s glands, you don’t screw around!”
    “No, but our
clients do.”
    “I’ll say. Moe’s
been making up for twenty lost years! I know his heart won’t go, but I worry about
his backbone
and pelvis!”
    “Enjoy. Keep me
posted, Lou.”
    “I’ll do that,
Mr. Copernick. Take care.”
    His calcium status
was back in the green. Copernick started to type in the day’s modification.
The straightening and rebuilding of his legs had been fairly straightforward, little more
than an adjunct to the rejuvenation process. But he was getting into major
genetic modifications, alien ground where he had met with more defeats than victories.
    “Every day in
every way, I’m getting better and better.” He chuckled, getting his nerve up.
    He was adding a
virus to his own bloodstream, one that had been tailored to penetrate the
blood-brain barrier. It was supposed to cause the cells in his cerebral cortex to